Learning Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics
A New Approach to Vocabulary Study

Learning Italian Words Through Etymology and Mnemonics will be the third book in the “Learning Foreign Language Words” series (the first being Learning Spanish Words, the second Learning French Words). The book is expected to be completed in late 2024. The format will be the same as that of the other two books in the series, except that each headword is prefixed with its frequency rank, and more information about etymology and cognation in other Romance languages (Spanish and French) are provided.

Sample Pages

The main text of this little dictionary arranges the words in the order of their usage frequency, per the itWaCItalian Web Corpus, "a 2 billion word corpus constructed from the Web limiting the crawl to the .it domain", which can be downloaded here (warning: big file) frequency list.

• Introduction and Notes
• Sample pages 1 from pp.1-2, 2 from pp.5-6
• Sample pages 3 from pp.9-10, 4 from pp.13-14
• Sample pages 5 from pp.19-20, 6 from pp.25-26
• Sample pages 7 from pp.31-32, 8 from pp.37-38
• Sample pages 9 from pp.45-46, 10 from pp.53-54
• Sample pages 11 from pp.63-64

Brief Timeline and Blog

• 2022-07 Evaluating various Italian word frequency lists.
• 2022-10 Beginning headword entries.

Yong Huang
July 2022 — January 2024